Chiral Magnetic Wave

By D. Kharzeev, Ho-Ung Yee. 2010

311 citations recorded by the source corpus.

We consider a relativistic plasma containing charged chiral fermions in an external magnetic field, e.g a chirally symmetric quark-gluon plasma created in relativistic heavy ion collisions. We show that triangle anomalies imply the existence of a new type of collective gapless excitation in this system that stems from the coupling between the density waves of the electric and chiral charges; we call it ”the Chiral Magnetic Wave” (CMW). The CMW exists even in a neutral plasma, i.e. in the absence of the axial and vector chemical potentials. We demonstrate the existence of CMW and study its properties using three different approaches: i) relativistic magnetohydrodynamics; ii) dimensional reduction to (1 + 1) Sine-Gordon model, appropriate in a strong magnetic field; and iii) holographic QCD (Sakai-Sugimoto model), appropriate at strong coupling. We also briefly discuss the phenomenological implications of the CMW for heavy ion collisions.

Subfields: Nuclear and High Energy Physics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/da8f89d2a115f7dc585acdf27eea405cd82eda10

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In Nuclear and High Energy Physics

1. V. Koch
2. T. Schaefer
3. N. Xu
4. P. Braun-Munzinger
5. K. Landsteiner
6. J. Stachel
7. I. Shovkovy
8. M. Stephanov

Citations in the corpus

• Anomalous transport of Weyl fermions in Weyl semimetals (2013, background): “It is however still an open question if they really lead to observable effects in heavy ion collisions, such as charge separation [23], a chiral magnetic wave [59, 60] or enhanced production of high spin baryons [61].”
• Holographic gravitational anomaly and chiral vortical effect (2011, background): “Chiral magnetic waves have been shown to arise through the interplay of chiral magnetic effect and chiral separation effect in [32].”
• Quantum field theory in a magnetic field: From quantum chromodynamics to graphene and Dirac semimetals (2015, background): “) The combination of the chiral separation and chiral magneti c effects can in turn give rise to a collective gapless excitation, known as the chiral magnetic wave (CMW) [457].”
• Notes on Anomaly Induced Transport (2016, result): “This signal has been theoretically predicted in [89, 90, 9] and observations in experiment compatible with it are reported in [91, 10].”
• Mapping the phases of quantum chromodynamics with beam energy scan (2019, background): “This is the Chiral Magnetic Wave (CMW), a gapless collective excitation in chiral matter [126, 127].”
• Properties of hot and dense matter from relativistic heavy ion collisions (2015, background): “An interesting recent observation is a measurement of charge dependent elliptic flow at RHIC [234], which could be interpreted as a manifestation of a new hydrodynamic mode, a chiral magnetic wave [235].”